There are black days ahead for the carbon industry

It might seem mildly entertaining that the media's warmist groupies, led by the BBC, have been so eager to report the latest claims of James Hansen and Phil Jones – of Climategate fame – that 2010 is the hottest year in history, while inches of "global warming" cover Britain with its most extensive November snowfall in 17 years, heralding what promises to be our fourth unusually cold winter in a row. The explanation for the recent renewed spate of warmist scare stories lies, of course, in the fact that several thousand politicians, officials and lobbyists from all over the world are today arriving in the Mexican holiday resort of Cancun, where they hope to salvage a binding UN treaty from the wreckage of last December's fiasco in Copenhagen.

None of the lobbying has been more telling than a statement issued by 259 investment organisations, controlling "collective assets totalling over $15 trillion" – including major banks, insurance companies and pension funds. These are the bodies calling most stridently for "government action on climate change", because they are the ones who hope to make vast sums of money out of it. They are desperate for a treaty of the type they failed to get at Copenhagen – even more so since the collapse of the US cap and trade bill – because they see their chance of turning global warming into the most lucrative fruit machine in history dwindling by the month. Read more.